After Chelsea left, I caught a ride to Chitina with an electrician on his way to work. I searched the one store in town for denatured alcohol for my camping stove, which I was once again unable to find. I’ve now been in Alaska two weeks and I still haven’t managed to buy any. Apparently they sell 99% alcohol as rubbing alcohol in pharmacies but in the ones I’ve tried, it always seems to be sold out. It’s fortunate that I’ve met people who’ve been willing to lend me their stoves because otherwise I wouldn’t have been able to cook anything at all.
It was raining hard in Chitina so I put on my full waterproofs to hitch the gravel road out to McCarthy. I only had to wait about twenty minutes before a little Citroen pulled up and a pleasant German lady called Heike got out to shift stuff around and make space for me. Soon we were on our way.
When I came to Alaska six years ago, the McCarthy road was in bad condition. I hitched in with my bicycle that time in a one-tonne pick-up truck which got a puncture when a railway spike went right through the tire. The signs still suggest that it’s like that, and people who haven’t been recently recommend taking two spare tires for the sixty mile each-way trip, but it’s really not a bad road anymore. Sections of it were recently chipsealed and it’s definitely no worse than the Alaska highway through the Yukon which is more than 2,000 km long. The Citroen made it fine.
Honestly, it wasn’t as dramatic as it sounds.
Gravel was not so bad. View was pretty.
An old wooden bridge for the railway, no longer used. We drove over one similar to this across a deep ravine. It was just wide enough to accommodate one vehicle.
For various complicated reasons involving the national park service and the local residents, the road to McCarthy ends about a mile before the town and you have to get out and walk across a footbridge over the Kennicott river. It’s a windy but beautiful spot. There’s then a second footbridge and a walk along a dirt road. For a whole load of other complicated reasons, there are actually cars on the other side of the footbridges because somebody bought up land on both sides of the river and built a private bridge. You can drive across if you pay $300 a year for the pleasure, thus limiting its use to locals or, I guess, tourists with way too much money.
First footbridge. Wide enough to drive a quadbike across. Or a four-wheeler, cause that’s what they call them round here.
View north from the first footbridge.
View north from the second footbridge, with a van stealthily hiding in the brush.
I walked into town. Before arriving, I’d checked the couchsurfing listings for McCarthy and found one person, or rather one couple: Diana and Bradie. They’d written that they lived in the wilderness in a cabin with no running water and that they were happy for people to pitch tents on their land. They gave their phone number because they don’t have reliable internet and I’d written it down before I came out. I wandered round the few buildings of McCarthy: the store, the bar and restaurant, the fancy hotel, all of which are owned by the same person. In the hotel a friendly lady lent me a phone to call Diana.
“I’m sorry to call out of the blue,” I said when she answered, “but I saw your listing on couchsurfing (“Oh cool,” she said) and I’m in McCarthy. I know it’s last minute but would you mind if I pitched my tent at your place?”
“No problem,” she said and gave me the necessary directions. A few minutes later, I was outside a medium-sized cabin in a spectacular spot: Wrangell mountains to the north, Chugach mountains to the south and a direct view of the icefall above the glaciers out of the kitchen window. Almost immediately, Diana went out to work and I was left to my own devices. Her boyfriend, Bradie, didn’t come home for a couple more hours so I hung out on the porch enjoying the view. When he arrived, he dealt admirably with this unexpected couchsurfer and made me dinner. Afterwards, I pitched my tent on one of the few bits of flat land next to the track where they parked their pick-up truck and got settled for what eventually became five nights.
Number of cars which drove down that track in the time I was there? Zero. Those are the Chugach Mountains in the background. This was also the view you got from the (open-fronted) outhouse, making it a particularly scenic toilet.
View from my tent of Diana and Bradie’s cabin and the Wrangell mountains in the background. They live in a magical place. Every morning I’d open my rainfly and look out at this for a few minutes before I got up. Paradise.
It’s difficult to put into words how great Diana and Bradie are both as hosts and as people. They work hard all winter in Colorado to save money, living out of their van, they work hard all summer in McCarthy, living in this cabin, and then they travel for a few months inbetween, which is a pretty enviable lifestyle. They showed me every possible kindness, they fed me, they took me out and helped me meet the locals, they showed me around and they’re both just great to hang out with. I’ve got so many photos from the hikes they took me on that they deserve their own blogpost, to come at some point in the future. Suffice it to say for now that I was very sad when I finally had to say goodbye to them.
By the end of my stay in McCarthy, a week had gone by and Chelsea had a couple of days off from work again so I called her up and she came out with some friends. We had a fun night out at the bar where we met a doctor called Matt from Minnesota about to start his residency in Anchorage. The next day I took Chelsea and Matt out on one of the hikes Bradie and Diana had taken me on and we had a real adventure, but more about that in the next post.
In the meantime, I’ll end this with a photo from the gravel bar next to Bradie and Diana’s cabin. One afternoon Bradie and I were sitting looking out in this direction when a bald eagle appeared and floated around for a few moments before swooping off out of sight behind the cabin. It was fantastic.
You’ll have to imagine the eagle.
Total distance hitchhiked: 826 km.
Total number of rides: 9.